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How To Keep Your Facebook Group Secret

By Paul Boutin March 16, 2011 7:51 pmMarch 16, 2011 7:51 pm

I recently joined an amateur music group whose members set up a Facebook group. Two days into the project, one member panicked. “All my friends can see everything we’re talking about,” she wrote us via e-mail. “I don’t want them to even know I’m doing this. We need to go back to e-mail.”

You don’t. Facebook has a privacy setting for groups that allows you to hide not only the group’s activity, but its very existence. To set it, you need to be configured as an admin for the group. By default, the only admin for a group is the Facebook member who created it.

To hide a group when creating it, look at the bottom of the dialog box that pops up when you click Create Group on the left side of your Facebook page. If you’ve already created the group, or are an admin for an existing group, go to the group’s home page and click the Edit Group button in its upper right corner. Either way, you’ll see a menu button with three settings: Open, Closed, and Secret.

An open group is fully visible to the rest of Facebook. A closed group lets others see that the group exists, but they can’t read its content unless they are added to the group. A secret group lives up to the name: nonmembers won’t be able to find the group at all. Facebook treats it as if it doesn’t exist.

Moreover, Facebook doesn’t let members share status updates from a secret group to their own personal feeds. This prevents someone from accidentally outing you with a click. For all Facebook’s hard-to-follow privacy settings, secret groups are the one place where you can trust that a conversation is being held in confidence.

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